Why rural African-American women who use cocaine mistrust women

Little is known about the social networks of rural African-American women who use drugs, although the social networks of their urban counterparts have been characterized as small, mixed gendered, and distrustful of other women. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the characteristics of the social networks of rural African-American women, both users and non-users of drugs. Thirty rural women who used cocaine participated in in-depth qualitative interviews. Rural women who used drugs gave several reasons for their mistrust of other women and tended to have small social networks, which included family members and men to the exclusion of non-familial women. The findings of this study have implications for both research and practice.     

‘Full‐time is a Given Here’: Part‐time Versus Full‐time Job Quality*

This study explores full‐time workers' understanding of and assumptions about part‐time work against six job quality components identified in recent literature. Forty interviews were conducted with employees in a public sector agency in Australia, a study context where part‐time work is ostensibly ‘good quality’ and is typically long term, voluntary, involving secure contracts (i.e. permanent rather than casual) and having predictable hours distributed evenly over the week and year. Despite strong collective bargaining arrangements as well as substantial legal and industrial obligations, the findings revealed some serious concerns for part‐time job quality. These concerns included reduced responsibilities and lesser access to high status roles and projects, a lack of access to promotion opportunities, increased work intensity and poor workplace support. The highly gendered, part‐time labour market also means that it is women who disproportionately experience this disadvantage. To foster equity, greater attention needs to focus on monitoring and enhancing job quality, regardless of hours worked.     

You Can't Expect Rationality from Pregnant Men: Reflections on Multi-disciplinarity in Management Research

The paper attempts to debate and answer two questions: (1) Does multi-disciplinary research in management constitute a distinctive approach? To which the brief answer is `no', because multi-disciplinary research is not one approach among all those others which can also be applied when researching management. Multi-disciplinary research into management is, as it were, the only game in town. (2) Can we rationally choose multi-disciplinary research into management as such at all? To which the response is also `no', because management research and multi-disciplinarity are inseparable, by reason of the fact that management is, in its very essence, multi-disciplinary, rather than mono-disciplinary, in nature.